Microlite Storyteller (Or: A DM's House Rules For White Wolf In Need To Feedback)

Inspired by Greywulf's totally kicking Microlite20], which I've been raving about to all my gaming chums offline recently, I've put together my own Microlite version of an RPG after inspiration struck me while reading White Wolf's books a few nights. I'm not a big White Wolf fan, so I'm going to need other people to tell me if this is an idea worth continuing with and what I would need to change to make it usable -I'm just a long-time D&D DM who ain't that fluent on Ventrue and Vitae. :-) But hopefully some of you guys will make something of this!

Some of you may wonder why I'd make a rules-light version of these games, especially since I've just admitted to running a high level 3,X campaign. Well, my regular campaign has been going for a few years now but every year we break for a couple of months on a "season ender", and use the downtime to play some one-offs. I still end up running most of these (though a couple of players keep promising to try their hand eventually) and most of them go alright - in particular, Ghostbusters International has become a big hit and one we all look forward to, and following Piratecat's great thread I picked up Dread and ran a great session of that last week.

One game we tried was Changeling: The Lost, one of the few White Wolf worlds that really grabbed me when I read the premise. We had a fun enough session with it, but we hit two issues. One was all me - I had real trouble turning the game into a one-off when all the hooks seemed much more long term and required player freeform input I just didn't feel I couldn fit into a few hours. (In the end, I had to end of a cliffhanger which the group seemed to enjoy, but which I didn't feel very comfortable with.) The other, though, was the rules system - which all of them found a bit lacking.

I think part of it is that Changeling characters, while perhaps not as complex as D&D's high level players, are still complex enough that coming into a pre-gen with little warning was a bit daunting. With just one copy of the core rules and one of changeling, it seemed a lot of page-flipping was taking place. The group said they'd consider playing again, but when I mooted looking for a different system they seemed very relieved.

Well, I picked up another White Wolf book - Demon: The Fallen in a second hand bin in my FLGS, and I was reading the oWoD rules and thinking about them. I was having the same issues as before - I couldn't see what to do with the plot for a short game as fun as it was to read, but I also found the crunch a bit daunting. That's when Microlite popped into my head, and I spent a few days scribbling down this very, very, VERY alpha document.

I don't pretend to know much about WoD, but I've included an appendix with my rules with guidelines for four monstrous races. Vampires, obviously, get a mention as the ones people will expect to see (even though I've never actually played the game in either version) - I've also included a quick guide for the other three White Wolf games I own. That's Changeling, Demon and... Street Fighter. :-)

I dunno when I'll next get to run a one-off (my players are super-psyched to restart our D&D campaign - I dunno if they'll let me stall any longer!) so I'm hoping you guys can make something of this and give me some pointers as to how to make it useful - or maybe even give it a spin yourselves. It won't fix my own problems with doing anything with White Wolf's background, and it'll never replace their fluff-heavy books for some (like WFRP or Star Wars, it's the fluff rather than the crunch that sells the books for a lot of people) but I'm hoping someone will get some use out of my excrutiating minutes of work. ;-)

This looks really cool. I'll never get my group in the RL to play it, but maybe online I might. Either way, I'm also interested in hearing feedback on this. Maybe someone should also see about getting this on the Microlite20 page

Neat, but you should watch out. Your combining oWoD with nWoD. So both rules and fluff are different.

Yeah, I don't know much about WoD but I do know that mechanics and fluff in the two different versions are, while still recogniseable as related, quite different. And since some elements of the existing rules are kinda tied up in fluff, it's easy to see why picking one rules way over the other would potentially make using some setting material easier than others.

Then again, at this level of simplification, I don't think it matters too much. The examples for Factions and Breeds are just that, hence being marked "usually" - tweaking it to other breeds from a specific edition, or even to your own creations, needs no crunch changes. I'd really appreciate someone more WoD fluent telling me if tehre's any rules decisions I've made which particularly mess up a NWoD or oWoD game - for example - if my alterations to make a quicker Morality system would be more of a pest with oWoD.